The WiFi Alliance’s primary intention is to certify hotspots. The specification it’s using is the result of cooperation between service providers and equipment manufacturers, with the aim of creating an industry-wide solution for shared WiFi access and roaming agreements.

Hardware manufactures like Cisco, Intel, MediaTek and Qualcomm have already received Passpoint certification. Once the hardware testing is complete, it will be up to the service providers to show a little spirit of cooperation.

Audiophiles have hotly debated whether the Samsung Galaxy S3 would come equipped with a Wolfson digital-to-analog converter for high quality audio output. This week, the Scottish electronics manufacturer stepped up to confirm that its WM1811 Audio Hub is the audio chip hiding inside the Galaxy S3. But wait, the US version is different. The US GS3 uses Qualcomm's WCD9310 instead of the Wolfson chip - apparently the Snapdragon S4 is at work here.

Just to show that some of us are never happy, some audio experts are claiming that the Galaxy S2 equipment is better. The GS2’s Yamaha DAC converts digital data into an analog signal that can drive a speaker (like the one in your headphones.) Good thing most of us can’t tell the difference.

Intel is doing what it can to stand up to multi-core market dominators like Samsung, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Intel’s general manager of mobile and communications Mike Bell acknowledged that Intel has supported multi-core chips since Android 2.3.4 but noted that internal testing had shown that multi-core chips sometimes run slower than single-core models. He said they’ve concluded that, in order to address this problem, Android needs to be more compatible with multi-core processors.

“If you take a look a lot of cell phone on the market, when you turn on the second core or having the second core there [on die], the [current] leakage is high enough and their power threshold is low enough because of the size of the case that it isn’t entirely clear you get much of a benefit to turning the second core on,” Bell claimed. “We ran our own numbers and [in] some of the use cases we’ve seen, having a second core is actually a detriment, because of the way some of the people have not implemented their thread scheduling.”

Bell also said that he has “taken a look at the multiple core implementations in the market, and frankly, in a thermal and/or power constrained environment – what has been implemented – it isn’t obvious to me you really get the advantage for the size and the cost of what’s going into that part.”

Intel isn’t talking about a deadline for the delivery of a multi-core Atom processor. Bell would only say that the company is investing in “software to fix the scheduler and fix the threading so if we do multi-core products it actually takes advantage of it.”